The present invention relates to Internet and telecommunication in general and to maintaining an accurate association between A-numbers and IP-addresses in particular.
A telephone user, hereafter called a subscriber, may, by using a modem, connect to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) and thus get access to the Internet through his regular voice telephone. The drawback is that while the subscriber is using his Internet account (xe2x80x9csurfingxe2x80x9d) his phone is busy and therefore anyone dialing the subscriber will get a busy-tone. This can be solved as described in the Swedish application SE-9602212-4 by forwarding calls to the subscriber to a voice gateway. The voice gateway handles the translation between voice and the Internet and the subscriber will receive a message indicating a waiting voice call and can connect to the calling party using state-of-the-art voice-over-IP technology. This way the subscriber may simultaneously be connected to the Internet and use his voice phone.
The subscriber may also place an outgoing call through the voice gateway in a similar manner. For a deeper description of the above mentioned ideas please refer to SE-9602212-4.
To be able to direct voice calls coming to the voice gateway to the right destination it is vital to maintain an accurate list of the relation between a-number and IP-addresses. This issue is not solved in the related art.
The present invention discloses a method and an apparatus for solving the problem with how to avoid IP-address collision when connection an incoming voice phone call to an internet application.
The purpose of the present invention is to be able to avoid IP-address collision and to be able to maintain an accurate reference list with IP-addresses and phone numbers.
The problem, described above, regarding how to avoid IP-address collision and to maintain an accurate IP-address and A-number list is solved by from time to time, for each entry in the list, send a message to an application located on the IP-address and depending on the answer or the lack of an answer update the list.